Drox Operative - Previews @ GI, Elder Geek

Two new previews of Soldak's Drox Operative are available from Gaming Illustrated and Elder Geek. From the former:

Throughout your exploits in space you will explore planets, search space debris, and encounter countless enemies to destroy as you work to accomplish your quest at hand.  Combat is relatively easy to master right away – it mostly relies on left clicking on your enemies until they’re dead.  The trick to fighting, especially in large groups, is determining which of your enemies at hand are the largest threats and who can be ignored until you have the more important targets under control.  After these fights you will find that some of the enemies may have dropped objects, which you can then pick up and install on your ship, upgrading defense, attack, speed, and many other attributes.  You also have a chance to find ship parts when you search wreckage floating in your path or you might happen upon some event on a new planet that you can reap some rewards from.  The interesting part about exploring new planets is that you may also yield new crew members in the process, and we all know having more crew members is never a bad thing until pay day comes, and yes, there is a time when you need to pay the salaries of those working aboard your vessel.  The inherent ability to choose which attributes to upgrade is imperative for an RPG game, and from my hands on experience with this game, I can attest to the fact that you really can make your ship work how you want it to work.  I tried out a couple different builds, but the one I landed on was heavily focused on dealing damage and being agile, as to be able to avoid incoming attacks.  With the added leveling system, where you get experience from destroying enemies and completing quests, I was able to customize my ship’s play style extremely finely, making it work exactly as I envisioned it working.  Now, I know for a fact that my build probably wasn’t the most effective because I had absolutely the bare minimum level of defenses, so I would be extremely easy to kill if I got stuck in a bind, but there lies the beauty of this game.  You can make it what you want.

...and the latter:

Unlike most action RPGs, Drox Operative does not really have a set story. It’s mainly up to you to figure out who you want to ally with and who you want to destroy. As you take quests from various races you will find out that the galaxy is very large and you will have to read a little to find out which star system or planet you need to go to. Completing quests boosts your relationship with the race that gave it to you, and depending on what you did, you might also diminish relationships with other races. The other races don’t just sit around waiting for you to finish quests either. If you take too long odds are they will just do it themselves and you will fail it, so pick and choose what quests you take.